A married couple (Steve Carell and Julianne Moore) deals with adultery in this comic drama.

Pity the crowds expecting another cute comedy like “Date Night” who wind up at “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” It’ll be like asking for a burger and getting served escargot.

The opening images set the pace for this fraught, bruised comedy of manners: Couples at a sexy restaurant play footsie under the table. But Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore) are not footwear-bonking. One reason is they’ve been married 25 years. Another: He’s wearing soiled New Balance sneakers.

For dessert, he wants a créme brulee; she’ll have the divorce, please.

Movies aim to be outrageous to flatter the audience that it is as off-the-hook as events unspooling before them. Cal is, like most of us, terribly on-the-hook, and this movie’s quiet but frequently stinging comedy comes from facing up to ordinary life, in all its shabby frustration. The lack of flattery makes the film gutsy and piquant, a mood enhanced by an uncommonly touching score full of woozy indie songs. Even the cool guy (Ryan Gosling) who helps Cal learn some game with the ladies (Emily is the only woman he’s ever slept with) is a walking slice of mortadella, a smarmy poser in a black shirt and matching handkerchief. He probably thinks “Night at the Roxbury” was a documentary.

Cal retreats to one of those cinderblock Motel 6/Divorced Dads’ Quarters you see by strip malls, commences major wardrobe renovations and has meaningless sex with an alcoholic (Marisa Tomei). Meanwhile, his eighth-grade son (Jonah Bobo) stages increasingly weird displays of affection for his high-school-age baby sitter (Analeigh Tipton) — who in turn thinks Cal is dreamy. Cal isn’t interested. So instead of providing raunchy moments, she’s like Mena Suvari in “American Beauty” — deluded and fragile.

Cal begins to try to creep back into his family’s life in quietly mad ways: He sneaks into the yard at night to do a little pruning. But while he’s there, Emily calls — claiming she needs to be coached about turning on the pilot light. In reality, she just wants to hear his voice. Both sides look hopeless, but the laughter here is tender and understanding, driven by compassion instead of scorn.

That isn’t the tone I was expecting from directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who wrote two of the most hilarious and profane comedies of the last decade (“Bad Santa” and “I Love You Phillip Morris”), but who are this time using a script by Dan Fogelman, who wrote “Cars.” With this movie, they move up a bit, into Judd Apatow territory (just as, a few years ago, Apatow got so big he became an adjective, at least in The New Yorker: “Apatovian”).

Carell, playing this sad, stuck but ever-hopeful man with tenderness and insight, shows again (as he did in “Little Miss Sunshine”) that he is the kind of actor who has an Oscar in his future. Moore, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to do except utter movie clichés that Cal gets to morbidly swat down. She says she doesn’t know “when you and I stopped being us,” and he replies, “Maybe it’s when you screwed David Lindhagen.” Also, there are occasional flat stretches, and in its care to flesh out six principal characters, the movie feels a little long. There is a reason for that: It’s heading for a big plot payoff that also provides an opportunity for some cathartic slapstick.

The grown-up attitude and novelistic eye for everyone border on treasonous for Hollywood (even the marriage-shattering David Lindhagen, played by Kevin Bacon, isn’t a caricature). Warner Brothers, which has also released such daring comedies as “Observe and Report,” should be given credit for releasing and heavily promoting the film. Perhaps only one other studio, the Apatow-linked Universal (which did “Bridesmaids” and “Funny People”) would have tolerated so little pandering — and so much antipandering.

Many viewers will realize (perhaps angrily) that they are the man in the New Balance sneakers or — worse — that their husbands are. Or that, as babysitters, they were pimply and ignorant, not seductive and in control. That’s funny, though: We all like to think we lead “The Hangover” lives as we place the paper towels in the shopping cart.